As a young Army officer on a two-week reserve tour of active duty, I found myself fortuitously assigned to Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in the midst of the 1982 Falklands War between Great Britain and Argentina.

For British soldiers and airmen stationed at NATO's military headquarters in Belgium, the war was a source of profound national pride, a reminder of those halcyon days of yore when the sun never set on Britain's scores of far-flung colonies and territories scattered across the globe and the Duke of Wellington and Horatio Nelson personified England's superpower status.

In launching their invasion in April, the Argentine military junta calculated London's leaders wouldn't have the stomach for combat half a world away over some bleak, windswept islands off South America's eastern flank with infinitely more sheep than British subjects. The generals expected the British to huff and puff -- and quietly allow what Argentina still calls the Malvinas to revert to Buenos Aires.

Like many a male British politician, they hadn't counted on Margaret Thatcher's steely resolve. She marshaled a massive air and sea armada, launched an amphibious assault and threw the Argentinians back into the South Atlantic Ocean in 74 days.

"Maggie has stiffened our spine and put the E back in Empire," a British sergeant told me one day as the war still raged, aglow with admiration for his country's gutsy prime minister.

Like Winston Churchill, with whom she's often compared, Thatcher suffered a similar fate after great military victories: indispensable in wartime, unemployable in peacetime. Yet until she was pushed out as Prime Minister she was the last British leader, and the first since Churchill, to epitomize the "special relationship" between Britain and its former colony.

Plainly, Thatcher was an acquired taste. German chancellor Helmut Kohl couldn't stand her and didn't care who knew it. In private moments with close aides and visiting diplomats, he complained bitterly that nobody -- man, woman or most ardent political foe -- spoke to him with such condescension as the Iron Lady. Kohl's unexpurgated diatribes will be amazing grist for historians when German archives are opened some day.

But Ronald Reagan discovered a kindred soul when he met Thatcher for the first time in 1979, shortly before she became prime minister. Forevermore, their shared conservative values and suspicion of communist regimes cemented their personal ties.

Many world leaders found her frosty and imperious, but she turned on the charm with Reagan, and he succumbed. "We are so grateful to you for putting freedom on the offensive, which is where it should be," she said in welcoming him to London in the summer of 1982. She was always characterizing his speeches and leadership as "magnificent," a" triumph," or other such gushing flourishes.

Reagan loved the blandishments -- but was more impressed with Thatcher's repeatedly demonstrated commitment to being America's most "valiant, staunch and true" ally -- especially in standing firm against Soviet ambitions. Despite occasional policy disagreements, they remained ideological bookends throughout Reagan's tenure.

It was no coincidence that his first and last state dinners honored Thatcher. "Those who love freedom have not had a better friend," Reagan said at their fond farewell. "She's a world leader in every meaning of the word."

Tom DeFrank was Newsweek's White House correspondent for 25 years and served as the Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News. He co-authored the memoirs of Secretary of State James Baker.

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